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Employers and Health Plans Bet on Health and Wellness Initiatives to Stem CostsNews Release FURTHER INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Much of the momentum for health and wellness initiatives has come from large employers looking for long-term strategies to address rising costs and to support their broader consumer-based strategy of giving employees more responsibility for health care decisions and costs, the study found. The investment payoff for health and wellness initiatives has been difficult to demonstrate, according to the study. Because many of the health and wellness activities in existence today have only been introduced recently and not yet evaluated, there is little credible evidence regarding return on investment. "Ultimately, the credibility of health and wellness activities to improve health and contain costs will depend on evidence demonstrating both health improvements and a positive return on investment," said Paul B. Ginsburg, Ph.D., president of HSC, a nonpartisan policy research organization funded in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "We heard from employers and health plans that health and wellness activities are the right thing to do and are particularly important as employees assume more responsibility for health care decisions and costs," said HSC Senior Fellow Debra A. Draper, Ph.D., coauthor of the study with HSC Health Researcher Ann Tynan, M.P.H., and HSC Senior Consulting Researcher Jon B. Christianson, Ph.D., of the University of Minnesota. Health and wellness activities are premised on the idea that healthier people will use fewer medical resources and be more productive. Health and wellness initiatives go beyond screening activities, such as mammograms and colonoscopies that detect disease, and differ from disease management and case management interventions, which are used once a disease is diagnosed. The studys findings are detailed in a new HSC Issue BriefHealth and
Wellness Initiatives: The Shift from Managing Illness to Promoting Healthavailable
here. Other key study findings include:
The Center for Studying Health System Change is a nonpartisan policy research organization committed to providing objective and timely research on the nations changing health system to help inform policy makers and contribute to better health care policy. HSC, based in Washington, D.C., is funded principally by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is affiliated with Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. |
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